Sweet Ophelia
by littorella
Summary: One lifetime proved to be far shorter than imagined. Thor and Loki watch a mortal death.


**Sweet Ophelia**

* * *

.

.

"You can go in now," the hospice nurse calmly whispered to him. She laid a soft hand on his shoulder and offered him a kind, middle-aged smile. He could see the lines around her blue eyes crinkle in earnest compassion as she guided him to the door. They would deepen over time as she aged; he knew from experience. The nurse held the door for him with a reassuring steadiness that spoke of comfort her peace with the whole process.

Thor smiled back half-heartedly. He didn't know if he'd find that same peace.

As he stepped into the room, the smell hit him like a wave of nauseating clarity—the scent of old age and death, a hybrid between decay with sterile chemicals. It was so strong that he had to place a hand on the wall to prevent himself from running away. A firm hand on his back gently pushed him forward. The room was beautiful with floor to ceiling windows and real flowers on the tables, but he could only see the the whiteness.

"It's alright, Mr. Foster. I'm right behind you." The nurse sounded so calm, so damn normal as though he were surveying furniture. Thor looked at the shriveled figure in the hospital bed, wrapped in plastic tubing and white sheets. How could someone think of this as anything but the tragedy it was? His Jane, his once beautiful Jane, drowning in the white. He had to cover his mouth with his hand to keep the nausea at bay.

"Feel free to ask any questions. If you have questions about the medications or what's going on, we can step outside and chat about it. You may not have questions now, but if they come up, I'm here."

Thor turned back to the nurse with horrified eyes. There was too much to ask and too little he wanted to know. He didn't know what to say to someone dying.

"What is on her face?" he whispered faintly.

The nurse smiled and replied, "It's just a tube for oxygen, to help her breath easier. Go on, I'm sure your mother will be happy to see you."

Her assumption twisted like knife in his chest. Mother. Time had passed cruelly, speeding and slowing at unwanted intervals. It was just yesterday when her hair had been dark and they belonged together in the mirror. But she grew older as he stayed the same. And then illness crept into her bones, her liver, her brain. And now…now…

With shaky steps, he approached the bed. The nurse pushed a chair behind him and gestured for him to sit. He sat mechanically.

Thor took her tiny hand and brushed his fingertips over her paper-thin skin. She was so cold and so small in his grasp. Were it not for all the machines beeping her weak pulse, he would have thought her dead. Jane laid like a wrinkled infant, withering from mortal homesickness, only able to sip the air with shallow breaths. Her skin pulled taut over her jutting bones and joints, and so dry, cracked and parched like desert soil. Her white hair had all fallen out from the treatments, but they hadn't been enough in the end. He could barely recognize her in this aged form.

"Will she return to us?" he asked softly, afraid of the answer.

Silence.

He'd been afraid of that. The hospice nurses treated death matter-of-factly and they saw too much of it to lie.

Jane stirred, her aching bones grinding in their sockets as she moaned. The nurse rushed over to the bed and leaned over the railings whispering hush sounds. She touched the elderly patient's pale, wrinkled head with unwavering care and delicacy. "It's alright, it's okay. Everything is alright. You have a visitor," she said warmly.

The old woman groaned something unintelligible. Thor felt a deep fear from not knowing what to do. Her eyes were open with a rheumy sheen, like they'd been open all day without a blink.

"Are you in pain?" The nurse leaned down to hear her answers.

Jane remained still.

"Are you thirsty?"

Jane stared past the nurse at Thor. Her brown eyes were glassy and unseeing, and he knew she could not recognize him. Thor felt her hand move ever so slightly in his, but he could not find any semblance of consciousness in her sunken face. Her jaw was slack, expressionless and hauntingly blank, even as she moaned.

"I'm here," he murmured.

"Go on, tell her who you are so she knows," the nurse urged, her hand still gently on Jane's head.

Thor swallowed against the lump in his throat. "It's Thor," he managed to croak out.

His heart burned in anguish as he watched her for a sign, anything. But all he could find was her emptiness. Unlike when she'd fallen ill in previous times, Jane was actively dying now. She was not fighting her way back any longer. Her frail and breaking body had lost its hold on her soul. Under her gown was a wasted, emaciated, frame of old bones just moments away from collapsing in on itself. Cachexia, the nurses called it. They rattled off words he could not comprehend like metastasis, malaise, sarcopenia, atrophy. All he knew was that she was turning into ashes before his very eyes.

"I'll leave you to have a moment alone now. Call if you need anything." She turned back to Jane and whispered, "See you in a bit, Ms. Foster."

The nurse left.

The room seemed to cool several degrees without her. He glanced down at the old woman's expressionless face with stricken pain. Being familiar with aging had not prepared him for the process of dying. Someone else had entered the room, flooding it with an unspeakable tension. Thor didn't have to turn around to know who it was.

"You were right," he confessed to the person behind him.

"And yet it grants me no delight," the visitor remarked lightly. Soft taps from his shoes echoed through the room as he stepped to stand beside Thor. He was dressed in all black, the color of mortal mourning, in anticipation for her departure. If it were not for his own all-consuming despair, Thor would have killed him for his callous mockery.

"It was not enough. It would have never been," Thor sighed, eyes never leaving Jane, "How did you know it would be this way?"

"Brother, you mistake my spite for wisdom."

Loki leaned forward to look at the dying woman, tracing all the tubes and needles with his gaze. The contraptions and machines overwhelmed Jane's tiny body like pooling water, but it was her blank expression that fascinated him. His green eyes lingered on her slacken face. She evoked only morbid curiosity in him, conjuring the thought that in old age, the body returned to a state not unlike it was before being born: wrinkled, non-functional and barely together.

Like Thor, he had never witnessed this type of languid dying either.

"I cannot understand why it has to be this way." Thor shook his head, still holding Jane's cold, mottled hand.

"Perhaps it is not in our nature," Loki offered.

"I wish that I were dying. I would give anything for their gift."

"Mortality is no gift."

Thor turned to his brother for the first time. He had no room left in his heart to fight. "Do you think she can hear us?"

Loki narrowed his eyes at the dying figure. Her pulse was quiet and erratic, her extremities turning gray from the failure of her ever weakening heart trying to conserve its blood. It could have been the drugs poisoning away the pain or her disease itself that gave it away, but he had the intuitive feeling she had long sneaked away and all that was left were electrical signals fizzling out into the static.

"Possibly," he lied.

Thor's shoulders sloped downward as he leaned down to place a kiss on Jane's frail hand. Her distant stare seemed to sap his strength and he wondered why it was so exhausting to just watch someone. The machines covered the silence, but did nothing for the infinite emptiness.

"I would like to be alone," Thor stated, finally ready to face mortal death.

Taking no amusement from the moment, Loki simply nodded and slipped out into the hallway. Taking a seat in one of the dark wood chairs of the hall which tried too hard to seem homely, he kept his eyes on Thor's back through the door's window. It was such an odd form of death, this mortal illness. It had no malice and no glory, but dug deeper than either could. He leaned on the arm and watched his brother's shaking shoulders. Thor, mighty untouchable Thor, was crying.

As he watched, Loki felt indescribable envy for the magnitude of his brother's emotion. He suddenly wished he too were able to love and mourn with the same abandon, to not fear the things he loved.

"Are you here for Ms. Foster? You can go in if you'd like," the hospice nurse explained in clear, enunciated words as she stopped by his chair. She held a tray of food, on her way to another patient and another crying person left behind.

"My brother desires a moment alone."

"Oh," she said with a knowing nod, "Well, I hope you don't mind me saying this, but you really should go in. I know he's taking it pretty hard and needs the time, but your mother is going to go any moment. I'd bet my nursing license on it. Go while you can. He'll forgive you later."

Loki laughed humorlessly.

"She is not my mother."

The nurse made a face, afraid she'd offended him. "I'm sorry, I just assumed."

"Tell me." He trained his attention on her. "How long until she dies?"

The woman stammered, clearly unsettled by his directness. Dead, dying, death were not words spoken in hospice. No one pretended, but hearing the words themselves seemed too harsh a burden on those who thought constantly about the process. She placed her free hand on her hip and replied, "Well sir, it's hard to say. Sometimes they stay until they know you are alright. Sometimes they just close their eyes and go."

Loki looked through the door's glass panel again. He could not hear sound from inside the room, but he didn't need to. It only echoed the emptiness inside of him to watch such suffering. Briefly, he wondered if Thor regretted having to endure such grief. But why would anyone regret? Minds were built to rationalize away things like regret. Again, he took in the scene greedily, as if he could somehow experience it by proxy.

"He must have loved her very much," the nurse commented as she followed his gaze.

"Yes," Loki conceded with a forlorn look, "And it is a fearsome thing to love what death can touch."

The nurse turned back to him to reply.

His chair was empty, lifeless as the wallpaper flowers. She stared at the chair in disbelief, unable to reconcile what had happened. The tray reminded her that she had something better to do that stand still. Walking in a haze to the next room, she tried to remember if he had been real at all. She played in her mind again and again what he had said. It was a fearsome thing to love what death could touch. He had spoken it as though he were thinking it for the first time.

"Lydia, bless you," her patient, an elderly man faring far better than Jane, exclaimed as she entered his room with his food.

Setting down the tray on the bedside table, she stopped and tended to her patient, helping him sit up.

"The strangest thing just happened to me, Mr. Blair."

"And what would that be?" the old man reached for his jello cup.

She played with the cross around her neck.

"He wasn't like I'd pictured them, but I think I saw an angel come for someone."

.


End file.
